Yves here. Pop star Bono is a case study in hypocrisy thanks to his use of corporate-friendly tax dodges and and advocacy of creating tax havens as a viable form of economic development. Ireland exemplifies of how well, as in badly, this approach has worked.
By Nicholas Shaxson, an expert on tax havens and author of Treasure Islands
Paul Hewson, an Irish crooner who likes to go by the name of Bono, is well known for calling on citizens to spend their tax dollars on fighting poverty in Africa – then setting up fancy structures to dodge paying his own taxes. The British celebrity entertainer Graham Norton skewers Bono effectively:
People like Bono really annoy me. He goes to hell and back to avoid paying tax. He has a special accountant. He works out . . . tax loopholes. And then he’s asking me to buy a well for an African village. Tarmac the road outside your house, you tight-wad!
So Bono is a selfish hypocrite. Many people know this already.
Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that he is an economic illiterate too.
Bono’s just been spouting off again in Britain’s Observer magazine:
“The Irish singer says his country’s tax policies have “brought our country the only prosperity we’ve known”. Bono said: “We are a tiny little country, we don’t have scale, and our version of scale is to be innovative and to be clever, and tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we’ve known.
“That’s how we got these companies here … We don’t have natural resources, we have to be able to attract people.”
It is impressive how much nonsense can be crammed into so few words. Where to begin?
Let’s start with ‘competitiveness.’
Companies do compete on tax: whole countries don’t – at least not in the way Bono means it.
To illustrate this, consider what the end point is of a fatal loss of competitiveness.
For a company, the end point is likely to be that it goes out of business, and disappears. The creative destruction involved, for all the pain involved, can be one source (among several) of the dynamism of markets.
But for a country, what is the logical end point of a fatal loss of competitiveness? A failed state?
No: clearly we are dealing with completely different beasts here. Companies competing belong in the field of microeconomic theory; the process of nation states engaging in a race to cut corporate tax rates is a politically driven process of beggar-thy-neighbour self-interest that bears no useful relationship to what companies do. Unfortunately, these two very different processes share a word in the English language: “competition” – so Irish singers, and many others, confuse and conflate the two.
That first confusion of Bono’s is doubly relevant here, because he regularly excuses his own abusive tax shenanigans by cloaking himself in Ireland’s “clever” tax games. Just how clever they are, we’ll soon see.
The precise words Bono used here, though, were not ‘competition’ but ‘tax competitiveness.’
Here he unveils at least two more illiteracies.
The first is the fallacy of composition. What is good for a corporation isn’t necessarily what is good for a country that hosts that corporation – especially when those goodies are extracted from that country by that corporation.
Tax is not a cost to an economy, but a transfer within it. So it’s not immediately obvious that a corporate tax cut – taking wealth away from public investment programmes and giving it to (often foreign) shareholders will make your economy more “competitive,” whatever that word means. Is a new factory more productive than a new road or a bunch of teachers’ salaries?
In response to this, Bono replies that tax cuts also attract business. “That’s how we got these companies here,” he pleads.
But is this even true?
The shortest answer is “no.” A slightly longer answer is: “it depends what you mean by ‘business.’ And here we get into the next layer of illiteracy.
When politicians (and, presumably, singers) talk about a need to seek foreign investment, they always mean the kind that brings jobs, supply chains, knowledge, and other good stuff: genuinely productive business, embedded in the local economy.
But ‘business’ that is sensitive to tax is – by definition! – flighty, and therefore not embedded in the local economy. So tax cuts generally bring the stuff that is least useful: unproductive profit-shuffling, that bring few jobs or real investment.
In fact, survey after survey shows that what brings foreign investment to a country is, above all, the rule of law, a healthy and educated workforce, good infrastructure, courts, and stuff like that. These require tax dollars. For genuine investors, tax breaks are nice, but not necessary, as one businessman summarised:
“I never made an investment decision based on the tax code…If you are giving money away I will take it. If you want to give me inducements for something I am going to do anyway, I will take it. But good business people do not do things because of inducements.”
And who, pray, was this screaming left-winger?
Step forward Paul O’Neill, the former chairman of Alcoa and former Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush.
Tax breaks can help attract some activity, at the margin, but aren’t that important. If you’ve given away your educational system to attract those marginal investors, that may well be a price too high to pay. Prof. Jim Stewart of Trinity College, Dublin, one of the only “tax dissident” public intellectuals in Ireland otherwise heavily captured by tax accountants and financial services interests, looks at this from a different angle, writing in the Financial Times recently:
A tax-based industrial policy will not produce an innovative economy at the cutting edge of technology and research.
It’s essential to add that it’s not Ireland’s headline 12.5 percent tax rate that is the big lure: it’s complex, the loophole-riddled tax system, which generally involve Ireland deciding what portion of profits doesn’t get taxed at that low rate. Stewart adds, via email:
The only people who understand these incentives are those working for the Big Four, who become large and powerful and exert considerable influence on government to extend and introduce new reliefs. Tax minimsation strategies dominate corporate decision making to the detriment of what is really important.
‘Ah’, I can hear Bono replying, ‘but Ireland has created real jobs in pharma and other high-tech sectors! So there!’
Not so fast, Mr. Hewson.
First, tax isn’t the driving force behind Ireland’s celebrated ‘Tiger” economy, no matter what the politicians and Irish tax-hype industry tell you. Far from it.
The big reason U.S. tech companies “locate” in Ireland is that it is a unique, culturally connected and English-speaking gateway for U.S. multinationals into the Eurozone. There are tax-related jobs and investment in Ireland, to be sure – but if Irish people spoke Latvian the country would see a tiny fraction of this, if anything. It’s a bit like Hong Kong’s success on the back of its role as a unique English-speaking gateway to China.
There’s nothing “clever” about this, Bono: it’s just history and geography, really.
The data clearly supports this. Look at the timing of when it all happened.
Ireland’s policy of trying to be a tax haven started in 1956, long before other European countries got into the game. Yet from the 1960s all the way to the 1990s, Ireland’s GNP per capita stubbornly stuck at just 60-65 percent of the EU average, even as Spain, Greece and Portugal saw theirs rise sharply. (And yes, Virginia, Ireland most certainly, absolutely is a tax haven.)
Source: Irish Economic Development Over Three Decades of EU Membership, Frank Barry, August 2003
It’s the period around the introduction of the European Single Market in 1992 when Irish growth took off. That, not the tax breaks, was what did it. (One might also describe this as a story about “catch-up” – or, in Ireland’s case, delayed catch-up – after entering the club.)
A second big reason for Ireland’s success in that era is the huge European transfers showered on it, notably since the doubling of EU infrastructural and cohesion funds in 1989, equivalent to 3 percent of GDP per annum, and agricultural subsidies worth 4 percent of GDP by the mid 1990s. Agriculture, broadly defined, produces about the same value added as multinational corporations do. These transfers directly fed Irish growth, and helped attract back many expatriate members of the Irish diaspora, educated on the back of someone else’s tax dollars.
A third reason for Ireland’s headline economic growth since the 1990s was that it has been peddling a cocktail of wild-west lax financial regulation. The Irish Financial Services Centre (IFSC), set up in 1987 under the “voraciously corrupt” Irish politician Charles Haughey, allowed firms from Wall Street and the City of London to gorge for years on a lack of scrutiny and lax financial regulation ahead of the financial crisis. (Read more about that sordid tale here.)
Tax was not a mainstay of this policy, which did have a measurable impact on headline Irish growth figures. But here’s the rub – and a fourth thing to say about the Celtic Tiger.
As we now know, the global financial crisis exposed it as a (mostly) paper tiger. The crisis affected Ireland worse than most; the sheer local pain of the crash has been masked by the pressure valve of massive Irish emigration, but it is surely the worst recession has endured in a century. The boom that preceded the crash was predicated heavily on a house price boom that puts many other booms into the shade, as The Economist’s House Price Index shows:
Bono may think this is an example of Ireland being “clever.”
If that isn’t enough for Mr. Hewson to digest, there’s more.
Ireland’s tax policies not only haven’t been remotely as successful as the lobbyists claim: it has effectively been pursuing a policy of trying to get rich by picking other countries’ pockets. (It’s a bit like popular musicians picking the pockets of their fellow taxpayers, while asking them to fork out for a well in an African village.)
Clever, perhaps, but only for some. And when you put in place tax policies like this, other countries respond.
Some bite back with attacks and opprobrium and sanctions, as the European Commission is now doing, with respect to some of its tax policies, potentially unravelling a cornerstone of Ireland’s offerings. A cowed Ireland, fresh from last year’s mauling in the U.S., is now considering abandoning one of its most famously abusive offerings: the “Double Irish” loophole.
A rising tide of public outrage and political will sustain the pressure on Ireland. Its strategy isn’t sustainable, even on its own terms.
And there’s another problem here. When you engage in a race to the bottom, others bite back in a different way: by trying to out-loophole you. The United Kingdom has been putting in place its own foolish, nasty, disingenuous and hypocritical corporate tax offerings, in the hope that by bowing down to mobile capital in a sufficiently prostrate fashion, some corporate bosses will shuffle a few profits in its direction. Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Gibraltar, Bermuda, and many others: they are all at it too.
The process that ensues as more and more join in is a classic race to the bottom, more akin to currency wars than to anything one might call ‘competition.’ Bono is casting himself as a popular cheerleader for this kind of economic warfare.
(As an aside, people must really stop using the traditional term ‘tax competition’ here and begin using the more economically literate term: tax wars, just as Brazilians say Guerra Fiscal to describe the jostling on tax that happens inside their federation.)
Bono digs a yet deeper hole for himself when he says stuff like this:
As a person who’s spent nearly 30 years fighting to get people out of poverty, it was somewhat humbling to realise that commerce played a bigger job than development.
I do struggle to picture Bono feeling humble.
More importantly, though, he is mixing ‘commerce’ (and, elsewhere, he’s said ‘business’) with ‘profit-shuffling’.
It’s true that “development” in poor countries doesn’t need to mean doling out aid. But it most certainly does mean allowing poor countries to be able to tax multinational corporations effectively – something Bono seems to be opposing.
Even Bono’s band mates don’t seem to agree with his woolly thinking, as the bit in bold here suggests:
“At the band’s headline gig at the 2011 Glastonbury festival, a small lobby of audience members waved banners protesting about the issue. U2’s guitarist, the Edge, said: “Was it totally fair? Probably not. The perception is a gross distortion. We do pay a lot of tax. But if I was them I probably would have done the same.”
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“So Bono is a selfish hypocrite. Many people know this already. Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that he is an economic illiterate too.”
While his position is indeed economic illiteracy, I think it’s worth noting that something much simpler and corrupt is going on here than mere ignorance.
With the recent forced-on-all-Apple-customers U2 album, and the recent announcement that U2 and Apple are jointly promoting a new Apple-only DRM music format to be rolled out next year, I think it’s safe to say that U2 is, for all extents and purposes, now a wholly owned subsidiary of Apple.
So Bono’s comments should be read purely in the context of an Apple spokesperson disingenuously defending Apple’s tax evasion schemes, only with better PR optics than if it had come from an ‘official’ Apple spokesperson.
Agreed, it is weird to leave out the obvious context here that is US tech companies, especially Apple. Apple held out making Macs in Ireland until the entire consumer electronics industry moved to East Asia. Apple was lambasted by the tech press for making expensive, overpriced toys. Now, thanks to the Asian supply chain and a focused corporate strategy, they are quite cost competitive.
There is also the critical component that is the financial sector, with this being one of a long list of articles that ignores the ‘f’ word – fraud – at the heart of what has gone wrong with our western systems of political economy.
But you have it backwards on DRM. Apple has been the good guys on this. It’s the record companies and movie studios and cable companies and other corporate content owners and distributors that have been anti-consumer (and anti-indie artist and small business) with an assist, of course, from the more general authoritarian desires of our political leadership. Apple has spent years, sometimes almost completely alone, arguing for the right to ‘rip, mix, and burn’, as one of the ads went.
More people have been prosecuted for intellectual property crimes than financial crimes. That’s actually a pretty telling soundbite of what is wrong with governance in the Anglo-American world.
“But you have it backwards on DRM. Apple has been the good guys on this.”
I’m not talking about 2007. I’m talking about today.
U2 and Apple announced a joint initiative in the past month to develop an Apple-only DRM music format to be rolled out next year.
(It’s not really a joint initiative, of course. It’s an Apple initiative that is being fronted by U2, for the same PR reasons Apple’s Irish desires are being fronted by Bono.)
Almost simultaneously, the famous 2007 Steve Jobs letter on DRM was ‘disappeared’ from all Apple websites, after being accessible there for years.
I was talking about before 2007 (U2 itself has been working with Apple for a decade now), but I hear your point, which is that something has changed this year, a new strategic direction as far as how Apple approaches users and the content industry. That could be true. I do agree that the change of the hotnews link to thoughts on music is intriguing, since the thoughts on flash and the 2008 environmental update are both still publicly active, especially in the context of the Beats acquisition.
Apple has also taken a lot of heat over the years for failing to address the streaming music business (where access is rented) as opposed to selling downloads owned by the customer. So it would be more than a little ironic for them to be lambasted for making some sort of splash in the streaming arena, which obviously, requires some kind of DRM. That has nothing to do with Apple. Everything requires authenticated access, from Netflix Streaming to Hulu Plus to the Watch ESPN app. The RIAA and the MPAA and others treat teenagers who flout the Religion of IP like criminals.
The speculation is what I think is premature, particularly given Apple’s business model and corporate culture.
***
First, I think you’re mistaken if you think U2 is floating trial balloons on behalf of Apple. That is not how Apple works. Apple is, shall we say, quite displeased when partners leak things. Look at the extent of the compartmentalization and cooperation from the financial companies on Apple Pay, for example. The simpler explanation is Bono is hyping himself, U2’s ability to reinvent recorded music in some sort of meaningfully new way, rather than speaking for Apple.
Second, on the substance, this isn’t a released product. I assume you are referencing rumors floating around about what a new direction for FairPlay might entail? I think that is both premature and inconsistent with Apple corporate strategy to speculate on unannounced products. Furthermore, it assumes Apple has become a collection of idiots. DRM doesn’t work. To think that Apple can make a format that can’t be pirated requires one to think that Apple’s entire culture has changed to embrace fantasy. Possible, of course. But lacking evidence so far. Adding an additional format is vastly different from making existing formats cease to work. Or solving the basic problem of physics: if you can see something and hear something, that something can be recorded by something other than your brain.
Third, and perhaps most important for the quagmire that IP has become, even if this is some sort of evil DRM, that doesn’t mean Apple has been pushing for it. It might actually be the opposite – maybe it’s simply the best deal Apple could negotiate, since, after all, in our present IP world, the ‘owners’ of bottlenecks hold all the cards, whether we’re talking Amazon or Comcast or Disney.
Which is its own intriguing subplot, since Steve Jobs’ personal wealth was primarily from Disney, not Apple, and content owners like Disney are already set up technically in the US market to stream access to media properties directly to Apple customers…
“First, I think you’re mistaken if you think U2 is floating trial balloons on behalf of Apple. That is not how Apple works. Apple is, shall we say, quite displeased when partners leak things … The simpler explanation is Bono is hyping himself, U2′s ability to reinvent recorded music in some sort of meaningfully new way, rather than speaking for Apple.”
U2 did a cover story for Time magazine saying they were embarked on a “secret project with Apple” to produce a new DRM music file format for release next year.
Apple did not disavow this in any way.
This happened within a week after Bono appeared at an Apple keynote, and Apple forced-on-all-customers a U2 album. Not to mention the disappearing of the Steve Jobs letter on DRM happening at the exact same time.
Occam’s Razor would strongly suggest this is not ‘Bono hyping himself’, and rather is U2 indeed fronting for an Apple initiative.
“I assume you are referencing rumors floating around about what a new direction for FairPlay might entail?”
No. I’m referencing the Time magazine cover story where U2 said they were embarked on a “secret project with Apple” to produce a new DRM music file format for release next year.
Again, the lack of any disavowal from Apple, and the bizarrely close co-operation between U2 and Apple while the Time magazine story was being prepared overwhelmingly suggest that U2 was indeed fronting for Apple, and not somehow freelancing.
The right to “rip, mix, and burn” but it’s nearly impossible to convert the iTune songs that you have PAID FOR to mp3 or any other format that will play in a non-iTunes player (which you can with any mp3 you have paid for, or otherwise, everywhere). What a joke they are.
Ah, but you can rip, mix & burn inside the ‘walled garden’ all you want! It’s the perfect mousetrap–just like neo-liberalism.
Nobody is objecting to taxes that pay for Courts, rule of law, etc. The objection comes when those taxes are used to subsidize politically connected companies, to “spread the wealth” in order to buy votes, etc.
In other words, government spending to perpetuate injustice is ok but government spending to reverse or alleviate it is not?
Oh, never mind, I misconstrued your comment. Sorry. Yes, we should all oppose cronyism.
Thanks. I’m an economics illiterate, but at least I know it & am smart enough to keep my trap shut. I gave up on Bono & U2 some time ago. I still love some of their older albums but bc of Bono’s b.s., I rarely listen to them anymore. Gives me heartburn.
Interesting about Bono & Apple. Hat tip to first comment. Color me unsurprised. These greed-heads can never get enough money, can they?
‘I rarely listen to them anymore. Gives me heartburn’
Me too, but I can’t work out if it is a natural evolution of taste, or an equally natural revulsion at what they’ve become. I can remember enjoying Saul Bellow’s writing rather less after realising he was a ‘kill the Arabs’ Zionist, so maybe the latter, though I find it increasingly hard to understand why I once liked all that aural ostentation.
Remember Bono’s investment in ‘Go USA’ meathead fantasy games?
‘Although Bono remains silent on the matter and Pandemic insists that “Mercenaries 2: World in Flames” is “a work of fictional entertainment” and “Venezuela was chosen for the setting of Mercenaries 2 (because it) is a fascinating and colorful country full of wonderful architecture, geography and culture,” members of the Venezuela Solidarity Network are appalled by the game’s openly racist, interventionist attitude’
http://venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1823
The overclass could do worse than contract U2 to provide the soundtrack to the loss of our freedom and prosperity. It would be ‘edgy’ and ‘authentic’, you can just imagine those thrusting chords accompanying dinner at Davos, or say the Troika’s next assault on Greece or Cyprus, or maybe the next police Tasering of Occupy protestors, or with the volume dialled down providing a discreet backdrop to the signing of a TTIP or TISA contract by a satrap with a gun to his head.
Hell, they’d probably do it for nothing.
LIke
My only surprise is that it’s taken so long for the mask to slip and reveal what a phony he really is.
The Bill Clinton of rock music. A self-promoting fraud. Plus: I’m a music lover and U2’s show at Foxboro a few years back was such a self-indulgent, overblown piece of bombastic shiite that my friends and I all left. U2 wasn’t a band on stage: it was a corporation.
‘The Bill Clinton of rock music’
+100. Same gimlet eyes for the prize, same shit-eating grin. Blair is from the same gene pool.
Ha, the only time I saw these social liberal clowns was at Vanderbilt’s Stadium in Nashville. They were charging 100 dollars/seat. Some other joes and I merely went to the top floor of the parking garage and had a free show!
I do think there has been a shift from Bono being a tool of plutocrats to being a fully aware partner. So while he’s been awful for decades this is somewhat new.
The good news is almost nobody cares about Bono anymore.
Meanwhile the Edge buys up mountains on the Malibu coast and liters it with his mansions, fighting with the coastal commission and preservationists all the way. Maybe Bono is the least objectionable of the band members.
In the name of greed, one more in the name of greed …
What with the CA drought and everything, I am definitely hoping for a small tightly contained but selectively devastating wildfire will sweep up his ocean view mansion(s) while he, family, pets and domestic staff are sitting out their tax evading residencies in Monaco.
bono…We don’t have natural resources, we have to be able to attract people.
he’ll rue the fracking day of that statement
Most of the natural resources have emigrated.
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0315/A-new-great-Irish-emigration-this-time-of-the-educated
U2 are well into the “Steel Wheels” phase of a typical rock band’s lifecycle where now they release crap albums every couple of years but end up making way more money touring than they ever did back in the days they made good music. And so Bono certainly has no financial need to be as honest as he is being. He could go on campaigning for non-threatening and popular things such as gays, girls, and gangtaz and he would have a happy life and maybe, on a slow year, finally get his Nobel Prize. But instead he spouts off about this tax stuff? I wonder if he is trying to set up some cushy elite corporate jobs for his children at like major fashion magazines or financial institutions and has to prove he is a trustworthy and reliable warrior for his social class?
Adele would never do something like that.
I was in a taxi going past her Chelsea town house the other day, I was tempted to throw a five pound note in the form of a paper aeroplane and see if I could get it through the letterbox. Somehow I managed to resist the urge, thinking that she is probably only down to her last £20M…
Sorry to blog-whore, but from 2012: ‘Bono, Obama and the G-8 Ally with Monsanto to Bio-Wreck African Agriculture’
http://my.firedoglake.com/wendydavis/2012/06/05/bono-obama-and-the-g-8-ally-with-monsanto-to-bio-wreck-african-agriculture/
“According to Rady Ananda of Food Freedom, the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition was created at the G-8 summit at Camp David in mid-May. Anada says that the New Alliance is simply:
“…a euphemism for monocultured, genetically modified crops and toxic agrochemicals aimed at making poor farmers debt slaves to corporations, while destroying the ecosphere for profit.”
Bono, Bill (Monsanto) Gates…you get the drift.
“The corporations will invest ‘contribute’ $3 billion over the next ten years in Tanzania, Ghana and Ethiopia; more sub-Saharan nations are apparently lining up to be ‘helped’ by this quasi-clone of Bill Gates’ Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), which spawned a site called Agra-watch which discovered that the Gates Foundation bought 500,000 shares of Monsanto while touting their grand zombie-seeds. But like AGRA, this one is business profiteering that will cause more poverty, disease, dependence on seed purchase from Monsanto and others every year, herbicide and pesticide use increase, and water and land lost to multinationals.”
Bono sucks. And so does his music. ;)
Just finished listening to Keith Richard’s “Life” in the car, and it’s shocking to be reminded of the tax situation back in the early seventies, when the Stones had to move to France (France!) in order to escape a 98% (!!!) tax rate in Britain. How times have changed.
The new U2 collection sucks, btw. More Edge, less Bono.
Good post!
The fellow who runs Lenin’s Tomb coined the phrase “Michael Jackson NGO Capitalism.” Bono has shown himself to be the well deserving heir of this phrase. “Bono NGO Capitalism.” He’s neoliberal to the core.
the whole idea of charity really upsets me. The state should provide all the things we’re told that desperately need our charity dollars, from kids in school, to hospitals, to art museums. I’m of the opinion that neoliberalism deliberately wants to pull moral and good minded people out of business and into the charity sector so that they won’t rock the boat.
I’ve noticed people saying they’ve had comments disappear; happened to me for the first time on this thread.
‘And who, pray, was this screaming left-winger? Step forward Paul O’Neill, the former chairman of Alcoa and former Treasury Secretary under George W. Bush’
Ironically, he was the Bushco guy Bono had trailing him around in Africa twelve years ago:
http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,250323,00.html
Now that I didn’t know. What a great find. Thanks Glenn
We’ve championed the poor and now its time to give something back to the rich, say leading exporters of managerial rock
Thanks for the executive summary. +1000
Global Corporate tax equality then disables the economic miracle. It’s no shame to have been a criminal (fraud), but it is to remain one. Denial best buys only the time to absorb the shock of realization.
ROTFLMAO! So do I, Yves.
Now that the laughter has died down a bit though, truthfully, this is just a bit sad. Back in the 80’s, I loved U2’s music. They had such a unique, innovative sound–completely unlike any other band on the market back then. As far as Bonobo is concerned, I agreed with some of his political/social views and disagreed with others. Either way, I didn’t hold it against him. Whatever inspires the artist to create is fine by me, so long as the creation is of high quality.
But when the artist decides that he wants to be a messiah, then I’m going to hold him to an entirely different standard. And let me tell you, Bonobo flunks by a mile. I’ve got nothing against helping starving kids in Africa (or even encouraging others to do it), but that is still no substitute for paying your taxes at home. And especially with so many Irish unemployed and hurting nowadays! Charity begins in the home, I say.
But Bonobo has now clearly gone beyond mere hypocrisy, and is engaging in strident advocacy for neo-liberalism. In my opinion, you can either be the Second Coming or you can be a ruthless neo-liberal, but you cannot be both. If anybody here is interested in reading up on Bonobo’s foibles through the years, look up Harry Browne’s numerous articles on him at Counterpunch.org.
By the way, I haven’t bought a U2 album since Zooropa. That’s about the time their music went downhill.
Early U2 are highly derivative of Public Image Ltd:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIAZ8unRm2c
Their guitarist, Keith Levine, basically invented The Edge’s guitar style. Sadly for Mr. Levine, it was The Edge who got rich from it…
Just to nitpick: Graham Norton is also Irish. He’s from Bandon, County Cork.